The data hosting and data centre strategy sets the vision that Scotland’s public sector data hosting is cost-effective, carbon neutral and makes appropriate use of cloud technology, for the delivery of efficient and highly available ICT services.

Traditionally a data centre is a large purpose-built facility
which provides a secure and controlled environment that is
necessary to support the operation of an organisation's
ICT
equipment that stores, processes and transmits its information. For
the purposes of this strategy, the term data centre is used to
cover any dedicated computer room or facility which is used to
house operational
ICT
equipment and systems. This
ICT
equipment typically includes networking systems (switches,
routers), servers and processing equipment, and storage systems
(tape and disk).

The successful delivery of digital public services is dependent
upon
ICT. As
the roll out of Digital Services proceeds and the dependency on
access to information becomes more critical to the way Government
bodies do business and make information available, the rising
demand for
ICT to
be available at all times increases.

Most existing data centres used in the public sector are not
capable, without significant investment, of meeting this demand for
increased capacity and reliability. Meanwhile, we are seeing
development of cloud computing, which is increasingly suited to
public sector requirements, for example in terms of scalability and
security.

A series of studies have been undertaken to understand the
current and future requirements of organisations and it is clear
from the findings that as technology has moved on, the public
sector in Scotland needs to prioritise cloud computing
virtualisation and consolidation to deliver on future
requirements.

Through the analysis of the use of data centres throughout the
public sector in Scotland we have identified that most do not
proactively measure their energy consumption or understand the
total cost of running their data hosting facilities.
ICT
industry financial analysis indicates that power consumption can
account for a third of the cost of running such a facility.

The strategy therefor sets the direction and principles against
which organisations will shift to service consumption, and cloud
provision and away from an individual silo approach by using
aggregated demand and economies of scale. It provides guidance and
will continue to do so as implementation is progressed and lessons
are learned.

The strategy sets out how the public sector will adopt the
following approaches for achieving significant efficiency and
energy savings: cloud computing, virtualisation and
co-location.

CLOUD- Cloud computing is a model for enabling
universal, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of
resources that can be rapidly deployed and released with minimal
management effort or service provider interaction. Cloud computing
offers numerous advantages both to end users and businesses of all
sizes in terms of scalability, reduction in the requirement to
support the infrastructure or the knowledge necessary to develop
and maintain the infrastructure, development environment or
application. The 3 dominant forms of deployment of cloud computing
are Public Cloud, Private Cloud, which can include the concept of
Community Cloud and Hybrid Cloud. Further information on cloud is
set out in
Annex A.

VIRTUALISATION- By using virtualisation
technologies, applications can be consolidated onto fewer physical
systems but can still be deployed in their own operating system
environment. In doing so it is important to consider the licensing
arrangements and the impact that virtualisation may have on these.
See
Annex B for further information.

CO-LOCATION- allows a business to own their own
server equipment; and rent space in a co-location hosting centre
owned by another organisation. It is clear from surveys that there
is space available across the public sector and private sector data
centres located in Scotland
. As a priority organisations must make use of those data
centres that meet environmental standards, classification and
security standards consistent with world class data
centres.Annex G provides further information on
co-location, and
Annex E describes the standards that will
apply.

The public sector's
High Level Operating Framework sets out the
high level principles for delivering
ICT in
the public sector. This data centre strategy is aligned with the
principles of this Framework. We will develop the Framework with
standards for data hosting and data centres.